California policymakers are considering new bills that would limit police use of biometric surveillance systems, after a statewide ban sunsetted.
“With the ban expiring, we actually have no safeguards, as we speak,” Assemblymember Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, who sponsored the 2019 moratorium, told Government Technology earlier this month. “Body cameras and facial recognition software could be used for any purpose. There are no regulations. There are no best practices.”
Many who advocate for restoring limits or bans cite concerns that the tool can make mistakes — prompting officers to arrest the wrong person — and that it can intrude on residents’ privacy and create an atmosphere of public surveillance that might chill free speech and protest.
But new measures are in the works. Ting’s new bill, AB 642, would allow police use of the tech under certain restrictions. Meanwhile, Assemblymember Lori Wilson’s bill, AB 1034, would echo the original state ban by preventing law enforcement from installing, activating or using biometric surveillance “in connection with an officer camera or data collected by an officer camera.”
Wilson brought her ban before the state’s Public Safety Committee on March 28. During that hearing, several assemblymembers said that they sympathized with concerns but that fully prohibiting the tool’s use was unnecessary.
“The fact that one person could be misidentified and brought into the criminal justice system is just one person too many. We should not be willy-nilly with this idea that, ‘Yeah, we captured a whole lot of criminals, but we put a few people in jail by accident,’” said committee chair Reginald Jones-Sawyer. “[But] I think this technology could be very effective once it's perfected … Part of the discussion we really should be having is, how do we perfect this? Or how do we put safeguards to ensure that if someone is misidentified, it doesn’t get to a point where they end up in prison or in jail?’"
Using facial recognition on police body cameras means residents may be tracked and identified whenever they pass by police, said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legislative associate Chao Jun Liu, during the hearing. This can be especially “unsettling” when it means being identified at sensitive locations like houses of worship or facilities that provide abortions.
“We all deserve a level of anonymity in our daily lives and in civic expression,” he said. “Face recognition technology on body cams makes it so anytime someone walks by a police officer, they could be recorded and identified without reason and without even knowing it.”
The bill describes similar concerns: “Widespread use of facial recognition on police body cameras would be the equivalent of requiring every Californian to show their photo ID card to every police officer they pass.”
Public Safety Committee vice chair Juan Alanis, however, said that people should not expect privacy when in public, given today’s technology climate.
“We have cars that are doing surveillance … We have cameras up on our houses. We have cameras at the banks, at the ATMs. Cameras are everywhere now,” Alanis said. “Pretty much everybody should assume that they’re being videoed.”
Alanis, who said he was previously a police sergeant, said he would support restrictions but that preventing use of facial recognition technology would be “a terrible idea.”
Discussing his own bill with GovTech, Ting said he doesn’t believe a full ban or moratorium could clear today’s Legislature. Instead, his proposed AB 642 limits police use of facial recognition.
“I decided to figure out, what were some of the best practices that we could employ across the state to make sure that facial recognition software was used for public safety, but not to infringe on our civil liberties?” Ting said.
The bill includes measures like requiring police to establish and publicize a written policy guiding their use of facial recognition systems, and to only allow authorized and trained personnel to use the technology.
The policy also would prevent facial recognition from serving as the sole justification for an arrest, search or affidavit for a warrant and explicitly bans using the technology to identify people solely based on protected characteristics — like sexual orientation or race.
This story first appeared in Government Technology magazine, Industry Insider — California’s sister publication.
